


Transbermuda

by SMJB



Series: Library of the Miskatonic University [3]
Category: Conan - Robert E. Howard, Conan the Barbarian & Related Fandoms, Cthulhu Mythos - Fandom, Cthulhu Mythos - H. P. Lovecraft, Hyperborean Cycle - Clark Ashton Smith, Original Work
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-16
Updated: 2020-07-07
Packaged: 2021-03-03 18:40:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 8,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24740200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SMJB/pseuds/SMJB
Summary: The search for Hyperborea leads some scientists into the Bermuda Triangle.
Series: Library of the Miskatonic University [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1782181
Comments: 1
Kudos: 4





	1. Chapter 1

_Transcript of a speech given by Dr. Lyle McKenzie, regarding the possible origins of a number of anomalous cultures in the archeological record._

MCKENZIE: Valusia. Leng. Atlantis. Kadath. Carcosa. Sarnath. Hyperborea. Mu. [ _The pronouncement of each name is accompanied by a slide of an ancient map allegedly depicting the respective land_ ] These are places that, simply put, do not exist--and yet...and yet. All around the world, there are certain archeological and paleontological...oddities. [ _The next slide depicts a man in a yellow safety jacket, presumably an archeologist, excavating a marked-off pit of skulls._ ] The mass grave of fifty-four viking mercenaries in Dorset, ritually slaughtered in a way inconsistent with any known custom of the natives. Initially blamed on the Romans until it was discovered that it was a thousand years too late. [ _The next slide shows an excavated skull which had been staked and then apparently burned in ancient times._ ] The Motala lakebed structure, built in a style inconsistent with that in the rest of 6000 BCE Sweden, and built over the grave of eleven individuals interred in a way consistent with accusations of fell necromancy.[ _The next slide is a picture of Göbekli Tepe._ ] And most famously of all of these there is Göbekli Tepe, which somehow managed to be built in Anatolia at a time before agriculture had spread to the region. And then of course, we see the occasional ruin of what was clearly an outpost of a greater civilization with no known--or indeed possible--nucleus.

MCKENZIE: [ _The next slide depicts a dig site in Greenland._ ] Let us take Civilization C-zero-C-five-W-eight--tentatively identified with “Lomar”--as our example. We find their ruins all over the Northern Atlantic, From Greenland to Britain to Nova Scotia to Norway. Clearly these people must have been expert seafarers to reach these locations, which presumably required them to have access to accurate maps, and yet that’s not what we see. [ _The next slide depicts a map of Hyperborea, as depicted in the Book of Eibon._ ] The maps that they hand down to us, having great detail and made in all apparent earnestness, are nonsense. We see none of the landmasses we know and many we do not.

MCKENZIE: The explanation proposed by Howard in the twenties, that the Earth has been through a series of cataclysmic events that reshaped it into its current form from the ones we see in maps of these ancient civilizations, is of course absurd on the face of it--but can you _truly_ blame him for grasping at some explanation other than the consensus of the time that these were religious totems depicting some heavenly realm? After all, more often than not “religion” is just archeologist code for “we have no idea why these people did this ridiculous thing,” and that was certainly the case this time around. And mind you I say that as someone whose ancestors, the Picts, he identified with every group of vaguely-westerly barbarians he could find reference to.

[ _The next slide comes from the excavation of the famous “Prince of Lomar” skeleton, depicting it in its original context, with grave goods._ ]

MCKENZIE: And then of course there are the grave goods of these peoples. As interesting as the trinquets are, _our_ interest is in the animals and plants they are buried with, as they are uniformly unlike anything else found in the region and often belong to lineages that all other evidence indicates went extinct tens of millions of years before. This man was buried with cycad fronds and an enantiornithine bird, and isotopic analyses done on him are not consistent with any known location on Earth.

MCKENZIE: Put it all together, and a very confused image emerges. Why, one would be forgiven for thinking that this man, with his strange animals and maps of impossible locations and his general alieness, came from another world!

[ _The previous line was said in a tone that implied an attempt at jest; his face becomes serious, showing that it was not._ ]

MCKENZIE: And that is _precisely_ what I’m suggesting. That the reason civilizations such as this seem so divorced from everything else that is going on in the world around them, appearing fully-formed like Aphrodite emerging from the ocean and disappearing just as mysteriously, is that they _are_. That the reason we never see any evidence of farms associated with C-zero-C-five-W-eight, or any other civilization associated with “Valusia” or “Hyperboria” or “Hyboria” is that their crops simply would not grow under our alien day and year.

[ _The next slide returns to the map of Hyperborea._ ]

MCKENZIE: Of course, as advanced as C-zero-C-five-W-eight was for its time, space travel was still a _bit_ beyond them--but not everything that comes to Earth does so in a ship. There are places where the walls between _here_ and _there_ are not as strong as they ought to be, whether “there” is another dimension, the dreamlands, or a place beyond the stars in our own space. The stability of such bridges is highly variable, of course, but my suggestion is that these people came here over such a connection. I cannot say whether the connections between our world and wherever in- or outside of our spacetime the core of this civilization lies still exist, but even if they don’t, others may have formed, and we should be on the lookout for them.

_Excerpt from an interview with Dr. Lisa Bennett._

BENNETT: I don’t know if you’ve seen Dr. McKenzie’s TED talk on anomalous civilizations, but I attended a lecture of his on the subject in 1996, and the pieces just sort of snapped together in my mind. If you had a “bridge” between worlds of the sort he proposed, though perhaps one that was less stable than his would have to have been or even one only allowing one-way travel, what would it look like? To my mind, it seemed that it would look like the Bermuda Triangle.

INTERVIEWER: And you got a grant for this research?

BENNETT: It wasn’t easy, I tell you; by the nineties, the so-called ‘esoteric sciences’ were relatively mature and we were coming back around to the view that sometimes crackpot ideas were simply crackpot ideas--and the Bermuda triangle had all the signs of that. Like, it’s not exactly a mystery why you get more missing ships in waters ships traverse more often, you know? And those were some very busy waterways. But after a couple years of crunching the numbers I could prove that something statistically significant and atypical was happening here.

INTERVIEWER: And so you started looking for the anomaly?

BENNETT: No, not then. First we had to rule out more mundane explanations, such as Deep Ones being [expletive deleted]. And even once we did that, they didn’t immediately let us build million-dollar drones and fly them over an area of open ocean, you know, for the _express purpose_ of losing them. We had to have some other way of proving the anomaly’s existence before we did that, and that meant we had to have some other way of finding it.

INTERVIEWER: And how did you do that?

BENNETT: We found a cold spot. It moved about, of course, but there was consistently a region somewhere roughly within the bounds of the Bermuda Triangle an area that was roughly four degrees--seven degrees fahrenheit--colder than the surroundings for no apparent reason.

INTERVIEWER: Why is that?

BENNETT: Part of it was that the Ankcnkorgril Islands are simply climatically cooler than the Bahamas, but the major part of it is that the bridge’s temporal effects create something of a Doppler effect, stretching out the infrared light that comes through from their end and condensing that which goes through from ours, creating an effect not unlike the heat pump in your refrigerator.

BENNETT: But of course, it would take us a long time to figure that out. We didn’t even know for sure that there was a Transbermuda--the portal could have led to the dreamlands, a parallel timeline, or even empty space for all we knew.

INTERVIEWER: So how long did you study it for before finally reaching Transbermuda?

BENNETT: Years. And frankly, the breakthrough came just in time to avoid running out of grant money.

INTERVIEWER: Even though you’d found the anomaly?

BENNETT: Oh, that had gotten my team the proper acclaim and accolades, but when it’s years later and all we’ve accomplished from sending God knows how many drones to the unknown beyond was some slight refinements to our model, the sheen had rather worn off.

INTERVIEWER: So what was holding you back?

BENNETT: Well, part of the problem was in getting a signal back from the probes once they reached the other side. It also appears that the passage is inherently dangerous--according to records from over there, only one in every five ships or airplanes we think might have been taken by the anomaly actually arrived there. Now, almost certainly part of that is that many of those simply sunk or crashed in our world and haven’t been found--but even today our probes only manage to successfully get from here to there half of the time.

INTERVIEWER: And what did it feel like when you started to get images back at last?

BENNETT: A million thoughts at once flowed through my head. Most prominently the sheer delight of success. And when I saw that pterodactyl, it’s hard to remember which thought I had first, but it was either the giddy and premature--and incorrect--speculation that this wasn’t “just” another world we’d found but the very world of Hyperborea, or else it was “Either this anomaly has been here for a _very_ long time or we’ve just proven panspermia on steroids.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I spent **so much** time trying to find a way to square the nonsense of the Conan timeline with actual prehistory--and I came up with some very creative ideas, but ultimately, we’d see a very different geological record and pattern of extinctions if there’s a continent-reshaping cataclysm every few thousand years. And while how much I'm willing to mess with that sort of thing is rather arbitrary, wherever the line is, this crossed it. And so I found a way to export this nonsense to another planet--at which point I realized that my mechanism for doing so was kinda-sorta the **exact** thing ufologists think happens in the Bermuda Triangle, and the rest was history. Or rather it will be, since there’s more of this to be published.
> 
> This entry ended up being divided due to length. Then I went and added the section that would have explained how “Ankcnkorgril” is pronounced to the next part for thematic reasons--sorry about that; I considered adding a note from the interviewer or the editor of whatever magazine it was published in explaining how to pronounce it, but looking at the word I figured that many of y’all will independently happen upon the correct-ish pronunciation (“on-ken-core-greel”) for the wrong reason. Don’t feel bad; the orthography is terrible on purpose. (One of many things that will be explained in chapter 2.)
> 
> (Fun fact: “Ankcnkorgril” already translates to “(the) Ankcn Island(s),” and so she just said “the the Ankcn Islands Islands.”)
> 
> Originally, this series was going to be a series of encyclopedia-esque entries describing various monsters, gods, and concepts from the Cthulhu Mythos--much like the series that inspired it, [_Proceedings of the Miskatonic University Department of Zoology_](https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/proceedings-of-the-miskatonic-university-department-of-zoology.386179/). On the day that the focus shifted to more of a first-person narrative basis, I was reading a story. The monster was described in detail, and I thought “Huh; neat.” Later one, a character in plain distress uttered the simple sentence “It weren’t Earthly,” and **then** a shiver went down my back. This strikes me as being a perfectly natural reaction--how many of us have watched cheetahs take down wildebeests in nature documentaries and walked away thinking “Nature is beautiful”? If you had watched that same cheetah do that same thing to a human being, you’d have had a **very** different reaction. Hence the first-person narration; there must be stakes for horror to be horror, there must be verisimilitude--you must know where you stand in relation to the monster.
> 
> But since **this** entry isn’t **meant** to be scary, I could afford to pull back the focus a bit. Go for the wider scope--and I mean, scopes don’t get much wider than introducing an original planet and trying to cover its entire history in 2k words, as we’ll do in the next chapter.


	2. Chapter 2

_From a very short-lived edition of the Wikipedia article on Transbermuda_

**Transbermuda** , also known as **Vorglysgrasvql** ( _/_[ _voɾ.glʌs.grɐs.vɵl_](https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/library-of-the-miskatonic-university.490733/) _/_ , because Klosarsrcmklu orthography is terrible[[ _tone_](https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/library-of-the-miskatonic-university.490733/)][[ _unnecessary_](https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/library-of-the-miskatonic-university.490733/)]), is an Earthlike planet accessible via the Bermuda Triangle Anomaly determined to exist in the Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxy. While the Anomaly is not an Einstein-Rosen bridge, or “true” wormhole, the Visser effect is theorized to hold, and so based on the distance between the two worlds the “present moment” on Transbermuda must be within 81,000 years of the “present moment” on Earth.

The Transbermuda end of the wormhole travels forward through time at 125% the rate that the Earth end does, creating an effect observationally similar to that of time dilation--for every five hours that pass on Earth, four hours pass on Transbermuda. This temporal effect has made settling on how to date events in Tranbermudan history a controversial affair. No doubt the best system[[ _opinion_](https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/library-of-the-miskatonic-university.490733/)] would be to use native dates to talk about native events, but between this effect and the fact that Tranbermuda, being a different planet, has a different day/year length than we do the arithmetic quickly becomes too daunting for casual use.

As such, the term _experiential year_ refers to a period of time roughly 8,766 hours in length while the term _calendar year_ refers to the time period on Transbermuda that corresponds to any given year on Earth--that is, if one person went through the Anomaly on January 1st 2010 and another went through on December 31st 2010, the time period between their arrivals on Transbermuda would be calendar year 2010 CE, which in calendar year 2020 CE would be eight experiential years before. When talking about the planetary year of Transbermuda, the term _ilfê_ (from the Klosar term _ilfc_ ) is used. The terms _calendar ilfê_ and _experiential ilfê_ also exist, but are generally used on Transbermuda to talk about us.

This creates some issues with the “stretching out” of the historical record--e.g. if it is currently 2020 CE then on Transbermuda 1520 CE was 400 experiential years before, 1020 CE was 800 experiential years ago, so on and so forth--but this is considered to be less problematic than attempting to count backwards from an ever-shifting present day or an arbitrarily defined zero hour.

Transbermuda has an average gravity of 9.73 m/s^2, a year of 6573.3 hours, and a day of 21.4 hours. Due to the temporal effect, these appear from a clock-syncing perspective[[ _this can’t be the correct term_](https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/library-of-the-miskatonic-university.490733/)] to be 94% and 111% the lengths of their Earthly counterparts, respectively, when in reality they are 75% and 89%, respectively. These facts have historically conspired to make Earth humans seem short-lived to Transbermudans.

Kliklombol and Klisraman have historically been the only continents inhabited by humans, but Ankcnkorgril (also known as the Ankcn Islands, sometimes rendered in English as the Ankên, Anken, or Onken Islands) began exploring the world in 1525 CE and has since set up some small colonies elsewhere in the world.

The Klosarsrcmklu writing system uses the Latin alphabet, which replaced an earlier rebus system in the sixteenth century. They inherited this alphabet from the Spanish, which Klosarsrcmklu has more vowels and fewer consonants than and were ignorant of the strategies that already existed to solve this problem, and were secure in the belief that no one would ever be able to judge them for their sins[ _tone!!!_ ], and so they simply used some of the unused consonants as vowels instead. Because it’s a true orthography rather than a Latinization scheme, changing it at this point is unfortunately[[ _tone_](https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/library-of-the-miskatonic-university.490733/)] difficult, and it also became the basis of all Latin-based orthographies in Tranbermuda. With the establishment of permanent contact between the worlds, there has been a movement to replace “c” (/ɛ/) with “ê” and “q” (/ɵ/) with “ø”, which would clean things up considerably and be a conceptually easy change to make[[ _source_](https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/library-of-the-miskatonic-university.490733/)]. There’s little that can be done about “y” (/ʌ/), but that is at least a vowel.

Due to the high risk of death when traversing the Bermuda Triangle Anomaly, attempting to travel from Earth to Transbermuda et vice versa is strictly forbidden[[ _by who?_](https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/library-of-the-miskatonic-university.490733/)]. Even if this issue is eventually overcome, there will still be the issue of endemic disease on both sides that will need to be addressed. 

**Contents** [[show](https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/library-of-the-miskatonic-university.490733/)]

[...]

**Biology**

_See also_[ _biology of Transbermuda_](https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/library-of-the-miskatonic-university.490733/).

Poposauroidea are the dominant clade on Tranbermuda, much as mammals are the dominant clade on Earth, and have been since a mass extinction 120 million years ago wiped out the para-mammals, a clade of derived synapsids. In spite of being on the crocodile side of the archosaur crown group rather than the bird side, all extant poposauroidea are warm-blooded and ancestrally bipedal. It is possible that endothermy evolved convergently in these animals, but it is currently thought this is the archosaur ancestral state and modern crocodilians became secondarily ectothermic as an adaptation to their lifestyle as shoreline ambush predators. Poposauridae have convergently evolved into a number of groups similar to dinosaur groups, though lacking feathers.

Dinosauromorpha are present in the paleontological record but went extinct 190 million years ago; the ornithodires survived through the pterosaur lineage, however. It is through descriptions of these animals from Transbermuda that it was determined that pterosaur pycnofibres are true feathers.

The most remarkable thing about Transbermudan fauna is its similarity to known Hyperborean, Hyborian, and Valusian fauna; according to genetic analysis, some animal remains from burials associated with these places have common ancestors with common Transbermudan livestock and pets as little as five million years ago, though this method of testing does not account for the possibility of world lines of unequal length. This, along with the fact that we begin to see invasive species from Earth appear on Transbermuda shortly after we see an end to Hyperborean presence on Earth leads some[ _who?_ ] to believe that the far end of the Bermuda Triangle Anomaly migrates from planet to planet in a relatively small volume of space. However, these other worlds were known to have birds that could not have come from Earth, so their absence in Transbermuda is intriguing.

[...]

The oldest evidence for Earth fauna and flora comes from the calendar year ~10,000 BCE in the Ankcnkorgril archipelago…

[...]

**Effects of human habitation**

The first evidence of human habitation in Ankcnkorgril date back to calendar year ~8000 BCE and is associated with a mass extinction. Some cite the fact that these come from established settlements as proof that human habitation must be much older, but this is not considered to be likely; humans are unlikely to be among the first Earth life to have arrived, there must have been many arrivals before the successful establishment of a population, and the connection between Transbermuda and Earth is not thought to long precede this date. The likely explanation for this early appearance of permanent settlements is Ankcnkorgril’s position in the Miltqs Sea; as a shallow epicontinental sea sandwiched between Kliklombol and Klisraman that also caught and channeled a rich oceanic current, the Miltqs Sea is the richest fishery in any world known to science and would have been far richer before eight thousand experiential years of human exploitation.

The first evidence of farming appears in Klikombol, and date back to…

_Excerpt from_ History of Ankcnkorgril, Volume 3: The Confederation _by Umaka John Smith fqn Fankin._

Srimvarfrydan Zalirodcr fqn Gertcl has been described, not unjustly, as George Washington if he was also Hercules in terms of cultural impact (remember that in Roman times Hercules was worshiped as a god), but probably a better comparison in terms of his actual accomplishments is to Ayenwatha. This is not a perfect comparison--for one thing, the Iroquois Confederation was a lot more democratic than the Ankcnkorgril Confederation; it also appears at first glance to have been more stable, but Imperial propaganda had a vested interest in presenting itself as being the orderly, sensible alternative to the bickering political chaos that came before--but the parallels are striking.

The Empire had no cause to downplay Srimvarfrydan himself, however--indeed, the idea of a Napoleonic figure (as they saw him) forcing peace, prosperity, and progress on a region through nothing but political maneuvering, strategic thinking, and sheer charisma played very well into their mythos. As such, Imperial propagandists accepted the tales of Srimvarfrydan that were handed down to them from Confederation propagandists at face value, and even expanded upon them.

Republican propagandists have had more of a mixed reaction to him. There is a natural antipathy towards such a prominent Imperial icon, and in my opinion this has lead to untoward zeal in dethroning him in the public consciousness.

Has his story been exaggerated? Almost certainly: Some of the feats attributed to him are downright supernatural, and the claim that “in the grim darkness of the feudal period there was only war; peace was unknown and unthinkable” is unsupported by the archaeological record. (Though to be clear, in spite of what some might tell you there _were_ wars; some of them quite big, involving many islands; see also Volume 2.) And of course, at a time when the King of Kings of Taladsrccvncck was engaging in “anti-piracy” harassment I can easily imagine that the idea of some sort of alliance or confederation had occurred to many minds.

But none of that changes the fact that Srimvarfrydan was the man who actually did it. However much the difficulty has been exaggerated since in order to enhance his grandeur, it would have been difficult, and Srimvarfrydan was the first and longest-serving Marshal of the Confederation for a reason.

[...]

The Ankcnkorgri Confederation was ruled by a Council of Elders. Each Councillor was appointed by one of the kings of the islands, but once appointed served for life--however, kings could appoint Councillors at will and without limit. While this arrangement meant that individual kingdoms could have wildly different numbers of representatives on the Council, this wasn’t theoretically much of a problem because Council decisions had to be unanimous.

In point of fact, the requirement for unanimous consent quickly became a problem in and of itself, but unofficial workarounds were devised; eventually, the official policy of ostracization, in which a Councillor could be removed from office by a unanimous vote by all Councillors not from their kingdom, was put into place to stem the tide of assassination and blackmail in Council politics.

There was also to be a commander-in-chief to make decisions that would take the Council too long to debate, such as the prosecution of a war: the Marshal of the Confederation. The marshal had near-absolute authority, but this was derived from the Council, whom he served at the pleasure of and could be recalled, dismissed, or even executed by at any time….

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I should really have fake footnotes in the fake wikipedia article, but that could make things confusing if I then have real footnotes to explain things like Umaka's name. In the end I did neither for fear that I might want to go back and insert the other later.
> 
> I had a lot to figure out with regard to how names work on Transbermuda, and naturally went with the most complicated possible option: given name, patronymic, surname when applicable (a late addition, for reasons you can probably guess), fqn/føn (“from”--I had this word randomly generated and the similarity is coincidental) place of birth. 
> 
> Umaka's given name is a Klosarsrcmklu adaptation of a Taino name (indeed, he's named for Cacique Jumacao (Doylistically--I doubt his parents were aware of the connection)), and as is hinted at by his father being named “John...Smith...” is an English speaker, allowing him to be both the author and translator of History of Ankcnkorgril, Volume 3; the unique insight this gives him into the mind of the author allows him to take liberties most translators wouldn't.
> 
> Of course, Srimvarfrydan having supernatural feats attributed to him doesn’t prove he didn’t do ‘em.
> 
> “Taladsrccvncck” is very much not a Klosarsrcmklu word, and the people who made that language's orthography had even less access to how the Latin alphabet is supposed to be used and based their orthography on Klosarsrcmklu's already-liberal adaptation of it, hence the use of double letters to represent sounds that don't exist in Klosarsrcmklu. “Talad-” rhymes with “salad,” “-srccv-” rhymes with “give,” and “-ncck” is pronounced “Nick.” It shares Klosarsrcmklu's utterly-unpronounceable-in-English “sr” onset because I am an asshole.
> 
> I didn't create a whole-ass conlang or anything, but I do try and figure out the allowed sounds and syllable structure of one whenever coming up with fantasy/alien names in order to ensure that there's some consistency. I used this site to come up with randomly generated names:
> 
> http://www.rinkworks.com/namegen/ 
> 
> The advanced interface allows you to create your own template. The template for a single syllable of Klosarsrcmklu is:
> 
> (|b|bl|br|d|dr|f|fl|fr|g|gl|gr|k|kl|kr|l|m|n|p|pl|pr|r|sl|sr|t|tr|v|vr|w|z)(i|e|c|q|a|u|o|y)(|l|m|n|r|s)
> 
> But the template I used most often, to give me words of 2-4 syllables, was:
> 
> (|b|bl|br|d|dr|f|fl|fr|g|gl|gr|k|kl|kr|l|m|n|p|pl|pr|r|sl|sr|t|tr|v|vr|w|z)(i|e|c|q|a|u|o|y)(|l|m|n|r|s)(|b|bl|br|d|dr|f|fl|fr|g|gl|gr|k|kl|kr|l|m|n|p|pl|pr|r|sl|sr|t|tr|v|vr|w|z)(i|e|c|q|a|u|o|y)(|l|m|n|r|s)<|(|b|bl|br|d|dr|f|fl|fr|g|gl|gr|k|kl|kr|l|m|n|p|pl|pr|r|sl|sr|t|tr|v|vr|w|z)(i|e|c|q|a|u|o|y)(|l|m|n|r|s)><|(|b|bl|br|d|dr|f|fl|fr|g|gl|gr|k|kl|kr|l|m|n|p|pl|pr|r|sl|sr|t|tr|v|vr|w|z)(i|e|c|q|a|u|o|y)(|l|m|n|r|s)>
> 
> I don't recommend using the improved orthography in the namegen--it tends to choke on special characters. I also honestly don't know how much sense this makes from a phoneme-ballancing perspective, but there's enough ambiguity left in most of the consonants that I'm sure something sensible could be arranged.


	3. Chapter 3

_Excerpt from_ History of Ankcnkorgril, Volume 4: The Empire _by Umaka John Smith fqn Fankin._

Rincnlurys Srasbrcl fqn Byne is sometimes said to be the actual longest-serving Marshal of the Confederation, but seeing how he spent most of his reign as the Marshal of the Empire, or the emperor to give the title its less literal but more frank translation, the general consensus is that it doesn’t count. In another history Rincnlurys may well have been nothing special, in terms of marshals. Perhaps he’d have served for a quiet decade or two, making the people feel safe from continental aggression, until the Council decided it was time to curry favor with some other important family and politely suggest he retire. But that was not to be his fate, for less than a year into his reign the world turned upside down.

The first Spanish ship to grace the Transbermudan seas, the _Santa Laura de Córdoba_ , arrived in 1506 CE and was quite a shock. It was of course a known fact that your world existed; hapless travellers from it have been washing up on our shores, so to speak, since time immemorial--to the point where the Taino-descended form a significant subculture among the Klosar. That, in fact, was exactly the problem: we knew of your world through the Taino, and on very rare occasions had travelers from further afield such as the odd Carib, and so the unquestioned consensus of the time was that the people of the Earth were technologically primitive--but as we were to suddenly and violently learn, this was not a universal trait.

The _Santa Laura de Córdoba_ was larger, stronger, and faster than the triremes that plied the Miltqs Sea at the time, and took advantage of this (and their steel and gunpowder) to engage in a career of piracy that lasted several months.

In spite of their advantages, however, they were a lone ship facing the full might and wrath of the Ankcnkorgril Confederation, and eventually--with the loss of much blood and fortune--they were taken. The survivors of the ship were questioned--this was made easier thanks to a Taino translator who was onboard--and the worst fears of the Confederation were confirmed; the Bahamas were being conquered by barbarous, hostile--and very advanced--invaders.

Existentially speaking, the Spanish were hardly a threat to Ankcnkorgril--they would never be arriving in enough numbers to conquer anything. What the _Santa Laura de Córdoba_ _had_ done was bad enough, however--a single ship had razed cities, knocked around the Confederation military with contemptible ease, terrorized Ankcnkorgril, and worst of all (from the perspective of the kings) brought trade to a screeching halt. This was not a state of affairs that could be allowed to repeat itself the next time a Spanish ship showed up--and no one was under the delusion that there would be no next time.

Originally, Rincnlurys sent priests to learn the invaders’ secrets; it quickly became apparent that he ought to be sending craftsmen. He commandeered land and resources--something he was fully empowered to do and that the Confederation had funds set aside for the express purpose of recompensing, but still not a move calculated to make him popular among the kings--for his laboratories and workshops. Droves of smiths, carpenters, sailors, and soldiers learned the European versions of their trades at these places.

All of whom worked for Rincnlurys.

It’s hard to know what the Council was thinking at the time--or rather, not to put too fine a point on it, it’s hard to know how much of the records we have of what the Council was thinking is real and how much is Imperial propaganda. I imagine that there _was_ concern over Rincnlurys’ growing power for the simple reason that in their position _I_ would be concerned about it. On the other hand, the story that the Council was fully prepared to call Rincnlurys before them and execute him when news of the second Spanish ship reached them and forced them to stay their hand strike me as being entirely too convenient to be real. The truth is no doubt somewhere in the middle, but where exactly is impossible to say.

In any case, Rincnlurys’ European-style ships were expensive and far from perfect at the time, their metallurgy crude, and their cannons more dangerous to their crews than to their enemies--but even so, once they ran the _Beatriz da Silva y de Menezes_ to ground they dealt with it swiftly, capturing it mostly intact, and a threat that had previously terrorized the Confederation for months was dealt with in a few days.

Thus it was that Rincnlurys was suddenly a very popular man in 1518 CE. Many who had doubts or reservations about him lost them. Thus emboldened, Rincnlurys began to use his ships to trade. The money went back to the state’s coffers, of course--but this was an income that he controlled, not the Council. A number of hapless merchants ended up losing their livelihoods (creating a convenient pool of sailors for Rincnlurys’ new ships), but the kings were delighted at no longer being forced to foot as much of the bill for Rincnlurys’ rather expensive activities.

Rincnlurys’s ships were few in number, and he had to keep some of them in the home waters, just in case, but those that went out into could go far and fast and had large cargo spaces and were singularly unafraid of pirates--and secure in their monopoly of European-style ships in these waters. As such, they were ideally situated to maximize their profits; they only dealt with high-value low-bulk items and were always careful to only flood the markets (at home or abroad) just enough to drive out competition but never enough to have to start trading in bulk.

In time they would learn that ships designed to brave the Atlantic had little trouble in any of Transbermuda’s moonless oceans and trade caravans would eventually circle the continents, selling goods from any given corner of what was then the known world at the opposite end--but that would come much later. Even in the early stages, though, it was clear that this was a fabulous source of wealth.

Many have wondered why no marshal prior to Rincnlurys tried to seize power. After all, they had the same sort of nigh-unlimited power that he had, didn’t they? Well, they did in theory, but theory and practice are very different animals. In practice, most prior marshals who tried such a thing would have seen their armies revolt more often than not--partially because of tradition and honor, and partially because the Council controlled the purse strings--and furthermore would be risking an uprising of the kings, who still held the theoretical power to raise militias.

These were the constraints that traditionally held marshals in check--none of which applied to Rincnlurys. Tradition had been, of necessity, turned on its head. The people and the kings had more faith in Rincnlurys’ ability to protect them from the European menace than the Council’s. Rincnlurys personally controlled growing sources of state income through his monopolous control of high-end trade and the blacksmiths. And even if one pretended that the kings would stand as one against Rincnlurys, their militias would be no match for his musket and cannon armed regulars.

Thus, it is not impossible for the Council in 1522 CE to have demanded he stand before them in audience and debrief them on his actions--what happened to marshals instead of trials, as they were technically speaking above the law--or even, as Imperial propaganda insists, that they had done so fully intending to kill him; it would not have been the first time such a thing had happened in Confederation history, after all. It’s another area in which we cannot be sure of the truth, however; we cannot know that such a meeting was ever even called. All we know is that this was the excuse used to justify Rincnlurys’ slaughter of the Council on June second of that calendar year, and that the Empire shrilly insists that he did so in self defense and to ensure the defense of Ankcnkorgril.

On that day, the Confederation died and the Empire was born.

[...]

When the third ship appeared in 1524 the Empire had attempted to use their growing knowledge of Spanish customs to take it with minimal bloodshed by pretending to be friendlies and requesting parley; unfortunately for them, this was a French pirate ship…

[...]

Imperial history claims that Rincnlurys was conflicted on what to do about the ship that arrived in 1537 CE; the prior ships had all engaged in hostilities, which was all the justification needed for pressing their crews into Confederation/Imperial service, but because they had the luck to have the major strength of their fleet on hand when the _San Ambrosio_ appeared they’d managed to put on a show of force impressive enough for this one to surrender without a fight--and so, having technically done nothing wrong, could they still be treated like the other Europeans? Prior to 1506 CE the standard policy of the Confederation had been to accept the accidental expatriates from Earth with open arms and allow them to settle where they would or could--these became the bases of a number of subcultures in Anknkorgril--but could that luxury be extended to a group as fundamentally dangerous as the Europeans?

This is what Imperial propaganda claims, and it is a load of bunk. The idea that he ever considered allowing the crew of the _San Ambrosio_ to live free lives as citizens of the Empire is, to say the least, unlikely; Rincnlurys’ power came, fundamentally, from his control of European technology, and the last thing he needed was a bunch of free Europeans setting up independent blacksmiths and suchlike. If this hadn’t been the ship that brought smallpox to Transbermuda, he would have found some other excuse.

Smallpox _was_ devastating, but not to the extent it was in the Americas; Transbermudans had greater experience with pandemics than our Amarindian cousins due to our history of animal husbandry. Thus, we had greater general immunity and perhaps more valuably a wealth of historical experience to call upon for this exact situation.

The Europeans were scattered to the winds (which, as they knew damn well, would do nothing to contain the spread of smallpox), and those with valuable skills were pressed into service, and this would be the policy of the Empire until its end. The better-behaved Europeans could go on to lead fairly normal lives, but they were still prisoners--they lived where the Empire told them to live, did the jobs the Empire told them to do, and were watched their entire lives.

This would very much affect the development of the English, French, and Spanish-speaking communities in centuries to come.

[...]

The Spanish Treasure Fleet carried more than just treasure, of course--it also carried practical and agricultural goods, and this would turn out to be of immense value to the Empire.

It is certainly possible that maize and other Earth crops had reached Ankcnkorgril prior to the Europeans, but the evidence is inconclusive and in any case it didn’t take, likely due to being adapted to an alien day and year. Only in the days of the Empire would Earthly crops be established on Transbermuda and, through laborious effort, adapted to it. Ironically, the idea was that they could be luxury foods sold to the elite, but the breeders did _too_ good a job…

[...]

Ankcnkorgril never colonized the mainlands; the Empire quickly realized it didn’t need to. Their power came from trade, and they lacked the European disease of mercantilism--and so, why spend men and materiel conquering and holding down land so that you can exploit it when you can simply ally yourself with local kings, put them in your debt, and have them exploit their land and people for you? The more they exploit their people, the more hated they become, the more they rely on you intervening in any coups to stay in power, the more in your pocket they are, the more they have to exploit their people to keep you happy. It would take Europeans until the twentieth century to discover that trick.

[...]

After the end of the Golden Age of Piracy, it became a lot less common for warships to find their way to Transbermuda outside of times of war, and piracy became much less of an automatic response of sailors to finding themselves in a new world. In a way this presented a problem, as it was difficult for the Empire to know how good of a job they were doing of keeping up with the Europeans, and as a direct result on the rare occasions that incidents did happen they could be bloodier.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The _Santa Laura de Córdoba_ , the _Beatriz da Silva y de Menezes_ , and the _San Ambrosio_ are fictional.
> 
> If Srimvarfrydan is a flawed Ayenwatha, then Rincnlurys is Julius Caesar if he had won, though both have shades of Napoleon Bonapart (more apparent in the latter).
> 
> Our boy Umaka’s assessment that “[i]t would take Europeans until the twentieth century to discover that trick” is incorrect--the system he describes is actually very reminiscent of how princely states were treated by the British Raj--but one must forgive him for his oversight, considering how scarce information about that sort of thing would have been until recently and the fact that neocolonialism has been explicitly (and to be fair, also accurately) compared to this...let’s go masks off and call it a “co-prosperity sphere”...by Republic propaganda his entire life.
> 
> (You know neocolonialism: “It’s shameful that all these petty dictators are exploiting all these third world countries. If only there was something we could do! What’s that? You want us to stop actively doing business with these dictators so that they no longer have the money they need to pay for the armies of mercenaries that are required to hold down the people of their nation? Then where would we get cheap resources from???”)
> 
> The final chapter is coming soon; it’s not done as of my writing this, but like, it’s pretty close to done.


	4. Chapter 4

_Excerpt from_ History of Ankcnkorgril, Volume 5: The Republic _by Umaka John Smith fqn Fankin._

When the _USS Cyclops_ appeared in Ankcnkorgril waters in 1918 CE, it was the first warship to have done so in over an experiential century. It was a collier--a bulk cargo ship explicitly designed to refuel other coal-fired naval ships at sea--built in 1910 and commissioned in 1917, and was transporting enough coal and munitions to give it a very eventful piracy career under its not particularly sane captain. As sucht proceeded to go on a tear the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the _Santa Laura de Córdoba_. Even worse for the pride of the Empire was that it hadn’t even been taken down by them but by mutiny.

This was one of the worse possible ends to an incident that was happening at the worst possible time for the Empire. It had undergone rapid industrialization (which, like every advancement from Earth, had been used to concentrate ever more power in the hands of the state), creating a fervent breeding ground for new ideas, a lot of which had also come through the Anomaly alongside the technology--the philosophies of Thomas Paine, Adam Smith, and Karl Marx were circling around the underclasses, and the mainlands were getting real sick of their leaders being neocolonial puppets. The Empire had often justified itself and its actions with the idea that they were the vanguard, the only thing protecting their world from the European menace; as such, their utter failure in the face of the _USS Cyclops_ , arguably a greater failure than that of the Confederation in that they’d at least defeated the _Santa Laura de Córdoba_ in the end and it had been the very definition of an outside context problem, caused them to lose a lot of their legitimacy.

The _USS Cyclops_ did not cause the revolution, it wasn’t even the spark that set off the proverbial keg of gunpowder, but it _did_ hasten things along to their inevitable conclusion.

[...]

To understand politics in the early Republic one must understand the situation in the late Empire. If you haven’t read my treatise on the history of the Empire, at this point it was essentially a megacorporation controlled by a dictator that owned everything and practiced an economic system that can only be described as state globalism. As such, young discontents looking for alternatives to the Empire would have found language that allowed them to criticize it in a comprehensible fashion in every major economic theory on Earth. This meant that the coalition of forces that overthrew the Empire was unusually broad, containing anarchists, socialists, supporters of capitalism, everything in between, and things that couldn’t be fairly classified as belonging to any of these broad categories all fought side-by-side--and then when the dust settled, these various forces that were united solely in their hatred of the Empire realized that they would have to somehow find a way to govern together.

And everyone was armed.

And so, some rather unique solutions were dreamed up to some very big problems. Our parliament, for example, is elected via a purely proportional voting system: before an election, a party must publish a ranked list of candidates--these can be chosen in whatever way the party’s political philosophy deems best (the position they came in in some sort of primary election, or ranked according to how well they did in individual up-down votes, or hand picked by the party boss--the possibilities are endless)--and the people vote not for individual candidates but for parties, which get the percentage of the seats that they got of the vote.

This was an inspired decision on several levels. It created a single ungerrymanderable nationwide district without forcing the people to somehow remember and accurately compare the promises of literally thousands of politicians; instead, they need only worry about a couple dozen party platforms, secure in the knowledge that the party had a leash on their members in the form of being able to move them up or down the roster in the next election. It also seriously injured the ability of voters to form parasocial relationships with their politicians that would blind them to their faults--and even if you do like “your” guy, they’re still explicitly a cog in the faceless machine that is the party.

Furthermore, since provinces had no role in national politics (also a result of the above), beyond the power that any large group of organized citizens would have, a lot of leeway could be had in drawing their borders. There was no reason that two provinces had to be the same size, for example, nor was there any incentive to gerrymander them. Nor was there any reason that a municipality shouldn’t have the power to succeed from one province and join another. There wasn’t even any reason that they couldn’t overlap. As a matter of fact, why put this in the hands of the state in the first place?

Hence the political geography of the Ankcnkorgril Republic, in which we don’t have provinces so much as free associations of municipalities, any one of which can be part of one district that governs regional farming communities, another that governs water rights in a particular watershed, and another that represents a particular cultural group all at the same time.

Another key feature of Ankenkorgril democracy is the fundamental principle, enshrined nearly to the extent that “one person, one vote” is, that anyone with any sort of political power, which includes economic and administrative power, is answerable to those over whom they wield that power. Sometimes they’re elected and sometimes they just face up-down votes of retention, sometimes these ballots are cast periodically and sometimes they need to be called for by a disgruntled underling, but everyone--including judges, bureaucrats, and foremen--can be dismissed if they incur the wrath of the people.

Those of you familiar with Leftist theory will recognize this as a form (arguably watered down in places) of democracy in the workplace, something Marxists in your world always promise but to my knowledge have never delivered, no doubt due to the corrupting influence of Lenin. You might be imagining as a result that this was a tough pill for the pro-capitalism contingent of the constitutional convention to swallow, but in fact the only real difficulty was in the technical aspect of figuring out what to actually do when a property owner was voted out by their employees/tenants.

This is because if the Klosar ever suffered from the delusion that economic power was somehow a distinct and separate entity from political power the way you people do (seriously: how do you pretend that you live in a democracy when your boss has the same approximate level of control over your life that a feudal lord had over his peasants?), three hundred experiential years of Imperial socio-economics cured us of it. There were differing positions on how power should be divided--hence the existence of a pro-capitalism contingent in the first place--but we understood very well the fundamental political principle that “Power is power is power, and those who have it in one currency can easily exchange it for another.” And in any case, one should remember that it wasn’t Karl Marx who called the bourgeoisie “an order of men...who have generally an interest to deceive and even oppress the public,” but Adam Smith.

 _Translation of an editorial in the_ Byne Times _, a (by Ankcnkorgril stantards) right-wing newsletter,_ _by Tqsturfrakcn Komfcmvrir fqn Zevrqn (or rather Tøsturfrakên Komfêmvrir føn Zevrøn, as the_ Byne Times _embraces the New Orthography)._

Today Ênrike Bymplonkro føn Dolzo breathed a sigh of relief as the judge ruled in his favor. He would be allowed to pass his restaurant on to his eldest son as he had always intended, and as it had been passed onto him. Ênrikwe had argued that the restaurant was a staple of the Dolzo community, that it contributed to the “charm” of the community, that it had been privately owned for ninety years now, and of course, argued towards the good character and competence of both himself and the son in question. This story has a happy ending for Ênrike--but had he lost, the estate would have had to sold the business to the state for whatever an independent evaluation determined it was worth upon Ênrike’s death.

“It was a real nail-biter,” says Ênrike. “No one batted an eye when my grandfather wanted to pass his business down onto his son; why do I have to jump through so many hoops? It just doesn’t seem fair. Absurd and unnecessary, is what it is.”

According to Professor Ilmarên Tanadisa føn Tadam of Êngêlsrek University, however, it is entirely necessary.

“I’m sure Ênrike and his family are perfectly decent people, but you have to remember what Vatrel said: Incentive is the measure of all things. It’s not a question of the integrity of any given individual--those who don’t do what’s necessary to get ahead in a system, by definition, will fall behind those that do. If you have a corruptible system, then a population in which ninety percent of the people are pure-hearted will come to be ruled by the ten percent who aren’t. Remove regulation upon business and the business world becomes dominated by those who would squeeze every last sês out of their employees until they have enough money to crush all competition, allowing them to become monopolies and charge exorbitant prices to their customers. You need look no further than America for proof of this, where wage theft has become so normalized that the very concept that employers should have to pay their employees has become offensive--hence, the unpaid internship.”

I pointed out to her that no one was arguing for total deregulation of the economy.

“Of course not,” said Ilmarên. “No one ever does, but that always seems to be where it ends up leading. In 1980 CE Ronald Reagan argued that the Amercian level of taxation wasn’t optimised for the level of government spending, and if you accept what he thought an adequate level of government spending was he might have even been right, strictly speaking; forty years later, taxes on the ruling caste are a third of what they were back then and his party has not only not relented one iota on the issue of continuing to cut those taxes, but gotten dogmatic about it. Constant vigilance is the price of freedom.”

“But why does the state need to interfere in the process of inheritance?” I asked. “Why can’t a man dispose of his property as he sees fit?”

“Let me flip that question on its head: What has Ênrike’s son done to earn this property? I presume he was a diligent worker or manager, or else the judge would not have allowed him to inherit, but there are many diligent workers and managers out there; he inherits because of an accident of birth.”

“There are limits to how far we can correct for such things,” I argued. “At some point, it becomes the state meddling in the affairs of citizens, and I think we’ve crossed that line.”

Ilmarên smirked. “My dear lass, we crossed the line of the state becoming meddlesome when we decided that murder ought to be punished. But I take your meaning: the optimal state is the one in which the minimal possible tyranny is used to achieve the maximal common good. To the assertion that we’ve crossed _that_ line I argue: what of the rights of the employees?

“Let us say that Ênrike’s son was not a diligent young man; what if, instead, he was a layabout and a dullard? Should he still automatically inherit his father’s property? Should the men and women who work at the restaurant be forced to risk losing their jobs through no fault of their own due to their place of employment being run into the ground by a man whom none of them chose to lead them?”

It was hard to argue against that, and yet… “There are judges whose decisions on these matters are driven by ideology rather than the facts at hand.”

“Indeed there are, with ideologies that predispose them both in favor of and against the property owners. This is a problem inherent in any hierarchical system--whenever one person has power over another, there will inevitably be those who, either through corrupt intent or incompetence or both, will misuse it. But the thing is, judges can be replaced. The framers of our constitution were very careful to make sure bad actors could always be replaced.”

Again it was hard to argue against her, and yet this was not the system that the framers of the constitution dreamed up; it was sufficient for them that a boss or landlord could be voted out, and that should that happen the state would then assess the value of the property and buy them out and decide what to do next (this was replaced with the modern system of a ranked vote between keeping the old boss/landlord, having the property be sold to a new one, having it be run by the state as part of a public option, and buying it themselves and becoming a co-op when it was realized that the state’s decisions about which of these options to choose was based less on the preferences of the workers/tenants and more on the composition of parliament’s ruling coalition). They hadn’t felt the need to restrict the ways in which capital itself could be bought or sold or inherited, to the point where practically the only way to have any is to build it yourself.

It is said that the Ankênkorgril Revolution was the only time in history that a socialist revolution resulted in the markets becoming _more_ open, but the Ankênkorgril Revolution _wasn’t_ a socialist revolution--so why have they been winning ever since? Professor Ilmarên would no doubt say that capitalism simply can’t compete when forced to do so on an even playing field, without access to the capitalist’s usual bag of dirty tricks. Others argue that there’s little point in capitalism when we can’t compete with the innovations coming through from Earth, a world with five times our population and five fourths the time to be inventive in; indeed, the only places where we outstrip them is where they’re held up by their own patent laws (for which we owe a debt of gratitude to Apple).

But personally? I think the truth is that by the time the Empire fell, there simply wasn’t a whole lot of capital left. Emperors had used every trick in the book to acquire as much power as they could in every sphere they could, and by the end everyone worked for the state. Seizing the wealth of the elite is a relatively uncontroversial thing when the venn diagram of people with wealth and people guilty of crimes against the people is pretty much a circle. People have gotten rich since then, of course--authors who sold a million books, actors in blockbuster movies, NEPmen--but the skills that allowed them to do so are not necessarily the skills needed to succeed in the world of capital. And not much incentive to get into an area that many view with suspicion--what does an owner of property actually do that is economically valuable, they ask? A wealthy actor or author has produced something with their labor that people desire, and even the NEPmen serve a function in keeping the markets stable, but someone whose whole job is to own? To squat on property and reap the money earned by the labor of others? Unnatural, they think. And so, capital did not expand as much as it could have, and restrictions on it went further than anywhere on Earth that recognizes the legitimacy of such a concept (and further than many that did not, I suspect)--and why not, when it affects such a small part of the population, whose goals as a class even Adam Smith said were often contrary to the public good?

And it’s not a trend I can see reversing of its own accord any time soon.

_Excerpt from a leaked CIA memo that had the above translation attached in a file._

Is this anything we can use? I know we can’t exactly send in field agents unless we’re willing to accept losing half of them going from here to there and ninety percent of them on the return trip, but if we could stir up native resentment and send arms and money, could they accomplish anything of value?

_Excerpt from the response._

And how would we send arms with the Klosar watching the wormhole like hawks? And anyway, this seems less like militant anticommunist fervor than mild suburban resentment.

I get your eagerness to do something--having a wealthy, functional communist state that’s simultaneously on our doorstep and in a position where we can’t pretend it’s any sort of physical threat to us loom large in the public consciousness at a time when the American capitalist system is going off the rails is, to put it mildly, not good--but I think we’d best stick to implying that they’re lying about the state of affairs over there. After all, with no way to independently confirm the information they beam at us, it might even be true.

_The response._

They’re very good liars if that’s the case, but I take your meaning. Still think we should keep an eye out for this sort of thing, though.

_The response._

Agreed. After all, you never know.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In our history the _USS Cyclops_ was moving manganese ore (necessary for making munitions, but I imagine not particularly useful if one doesn’t have access to a factory), but having it be armed to the teeth instead makes for a more interesting story.
> 
> “Sês”/“scs” comes from “sesenta y cuatro,” the logic being that when you divide a piece of eight into bits (eighths), you get pieces of sixty four. This results in a rather binary coinage system: half sês, sês, double sês, half peso, peso, double peso, half real, real, double real, half oto, oto (from “ocho,” denoting that it’s worth eight reals), double oto.
> 
> A “NEPman” (NEP standing for New Economic Policy) was a class of middlemen that existed in the pre-Stalin Soviet Union that would buy excess production _here_ and sell it _there_ , equalizing inefficiencies in the Soviet market and often getting quite rich in the process. Were I “translating” for myself I would probably use a less wildly obscure term (such as “trader” or “merchant”) but Umaka is doing his own translating in-universe and this is the term he chose.
> 
> Also, Apple is an infamous patent troll, hence it getting swerved at here.
> 
> Let’s talk about politics in writing for a second. It is impossible for anything you write to be apolitical. For one thing, when you get right down to it “murder should be illegal” is a political opinion--we just don’t think of it as one because it’s one of the least controversial political opinions out there. For another, if you were to, say, dream up a fantasy society in which socialistic and capitalistic forces vie for control, for a _totally random_ example, your opinions on the relative virtues of capitalism and socialism is going to influence what you think is going to happen, not to mention what you think a “happy ending” looks like. More broadly than that, your politics influence who you cast as the heroes and villains of your story and what motivations you think drive them.
> 
> On the flip side however, a story must be a story first and a political screed second. The perfect political message counts for nothing if no one reads it because people are bored to tears by your drek, after all. If you have characters (something which comes highly recommended, I hear) that are meant to pass for real people, the thing about real people is that they’re going to have opinions that differ from yours (and being a viewpoint character and a writer in her own right, our girl Tøsturfrakên/Tqsturfrakcn was out here making _framing choices_ that were different from mine, which was annoying--hence the introduction of those CIA guys to put things into context, as it were). Furthermore, just because I know why something happened doesn’t mean the characters do--they’re going to come up with their own theories, that make sense according to their own politics. Another thing about characters is that they speak in their own voices--these CIA guys neither know nor care that there’s technically no such thing as a communist state since communism is the idea that anarchism can be achieved through socialism, to put it in a way that’ll piss off pedants of all stripes.
> 
> Before the “second” for talking about politics ends: I believe Vladimir Lenin did more to destroy socialism than a hundred Joseph McCarthy’s could ever hope to dream. Every single problem the Soviet Union faced, from corruption to stagnation to Stalin, stems directly from Lenin’s autocratic tendencies (and if you read _The Dictator’s Handbook_ , you’ll see that such things do so inevitably), and every socialist state that failed in our world did so specifically because they took their cues from the Soviet Union, and thus from Leninism. Also I am suspicious of the idea of a centrally planned economy, though I suppose it might have its place, and it seems to me that an elected bureaucracy would probably be just as problematic as an elected judiciary is (Ankcnkorgril uses something like the [Missouri Plan](https://ballotpedia.org/Assisted_appointment_\(judicial_selection\)) for bureaucratic appointments, FYI--hence its democracy in the workplace being “watered down in places”).
> 
> If it seems to you that I just said “the only thing I hate about communism is all the communism,” then you could probably use a more granular understanding of socialism. I recommend as a primer, ironically enough, _Revolution and the State_ by Vladimir Lenin--just remember that he’s a goddamn snake and both he and everyone he quotes are full of shit sometimes (in particular, the Engels quote about revolutions being inherently authoritarian is an association fallacy--authoritarianism being inherently violent doesn’t imply the inverse, asshole, or are you telling me that self defense doesn’t exist???).
> 
> Well if I keep talking about how much I hate Vladimir Lenin and/or the constitution of the USSR I’ll never stop, so I guess I’ll end it here.


End file.
